By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Wife’s Story’ is a short story with a twist. Published in 1982, it’s a short tale whose narrator, at the end of the story, turns out to be different from what we have been led to believe. One of Ursula Le Guin’s best-known tales, ‘The Wife’s Story’ is story narrated by a wife, who turns out to be a wolf who is ‘married’ to a werewolf.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Day Before the Revolution’ is a 1974 short story by the American fantasy and science-fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018). The story is a prologue – indeed, a prequel – to Le Guin’s ‘ambiguous utopia’ novel The Dispossessed. ‘The Day Before the Revolution’ focuses on the last day in the life of Odo, the woman who had led the revolution that established the anarchist society depicted in The Dispossessed.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Writers can get ideas from the strangest of places. Omelas, the distinctive-sounding but entirely fictional city in Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1973 short story ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’, came from her reading a road sign for Salem, Oregon, (‘Salem, O.’) in her car’s rear-view mirror.